Lost Secrets

In last Friday's cold, grey dawn, two tall and dead-serious Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen knocked on the door of an Ottawa apartment. When the door opened, they walked in. Shortly they walked out again--with the sleepy occupant in tow.

At the same hour, the same thing happened elsewhere in the capital. Not all the raids went off as planned. At a third-floor apartment on Ottawa's Elgin Street, four Mounties almost failed to get their man. When they entered, they were thumped by the awakened tenant, who thought he was being robbed. The man they really wanted was asleep next door. There were raids elsewhere in Canada too--reportedly in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton. By week's end at least a score of men were "detained." One Canadian was reportedly picked up in London.

These were not ordinary arrests. They were part of one of the most shocking spy stories in Dominion history. Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King told part of the sobering truth in an unprecedented, 320-word statement: "Information of undoubted authenticity has reached the Canadian Government which establishes that there have been disclosures of secret and confidential information to ... a foreign mission in Ottawa. . . . The persons involved include some now employed or who have been employed in a number of [Government departments]." The rest of the truth was harder to pin down.

The foreign power involved was Russia. What Russia wanted was the secret of atomic energy, held jointly by the U.S., Canada and Britain. More particularly she wanted primary scientific data which would enable her own scientists to build a pilot plant for the manufacture of fissionable material--a plant such as Canada owns and operates at Chalk River, Ont. To get such information, Soviet agents had been cultivating susceptible Canadians--some in positions of trust in the Government, some employed in the National Research Council, Canadian custodian of atomic-energy secrets. Little or no money changed hands. The traitorous Canadians had, it was quite clear, collaborated with Russia chiefly for political reasons: they were sympathetic toward Communism.

Canada (and the U.S. and Britain) had learned about the plot months ago, presumably from some tattler involved in it. The Mounties had not moved immediately, for several reasons. For one thing, evidence had to be complete. Furthermore, delay enlarged the catch. Most important, perhaps, were diplomatic considerations that smelled strongly of appeasement: premature disclosure of the plot might have meant a rupture with the Soviet Union just as UNO was gathering for its first meeting.

Canadians would not long be alone in their shame. Canada is a conservative country, with a very small Communist movement. It took no imagination to visualize what kind of a Soviet network was operating in much larger nations, like the U.S. and Britain. One source, in Washington, said that the FBI could crack down at any moment on 1,500 irresponsible secret-peddlers in the U.S. Such a crackdown was probably not far away.

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